The opening of the ‘Handshake3: Reflect’ exhibition at The Dowse signals the end of Handshake3 which prompted me to look at where I was at at the beginning – at the HS3 Jewelcamp in February last year. According to my Jewelcamp powerpoint presentation, I was on a mission to make jewellery with less than one…

i have repurposed a shelf in my office to look like a brick wall so that I can plan my installation of objects with jewelleryness at The Dowse.  

Last Wednesday I attended the opening of the Weeds jewellery collective exhibition ‘re-Production’ at Masterworks Gallery along with a whole lot of other Auckland Jewellery Geeks. Here I noticed two most definite examples of Jewelleryness happening amongst jewellers. The Weeds jewellery collective – Fran Allison, Andrea Daly, Shelley Norton and formerly Lisa Walker – have…

On our first day in Stockholm in September last year for the Handshake3 Platina show Raewyn Walsh, Sarah Read and I enjoyed a delicious lunch and two glasses of wine outside a lovely little restaurant in Gamla Stan. The conversation turned to a crit session of ‘where to now’ and ‘where to for The Dowse…

This packet of sunshine pegs was just so beautiful that I had to take a photo of it before I ripped into it to take a handful of pegs camping this weekend.  I have the funniest feeling that the remainder of the packet is going to be worn. Just stick a string on it and call…

I have not blogged for a while because I have been very busy planning and preparing: Before starting my Handshake journey in 2011 I thought my only chance of travelling from little old New Zealand to Germany to experience Schmuck week in Munich would be if I miraculously got into Schmuck – something that seemed…

“It will all come out in the wash” a collaboration exhibition between Handshake and Dialogue Collective.   Munich Jewellery Week 2017 17-20 H 84GHZ MIT LOT62 “It will all come out in the wash” Handshake meets Dialogue Collective, Schleissheimer Strasse 62. 9-12 March Fri-Sun 12-19h

I have been trying to get a bit flasher with my Meteors From Space installation for their next appearance.  My experiments into spacial illumination have shown some positive results, however the universe will only be visible in a darkened room. Similarly it is almost impossible to see stars when the Sun is in the sky.…

Finding my jewelleryness whakapapa – or the lineage to my conceptual development. The next big project we are working towards in Handshake 3 is a show at The Dowse Art Museum curated by Sian van Dyk. In preparation for this event, Sian has invited us to ‘Reflect’ on how and why we do jewellery. Having…

Meteors – just stick a pin in them and call them a brooch. My installation at Platina was an adventure into 2d/3d space. I thought making the scatter of 100 Meteors look random would be easy if I started with the smallest ones and progressed up to the longest ones.  This was reasonably successful –…

My NASA Earth Facebook feed tells me there has been a few Perseid meteors showering down on earth this week. There have also been quite a few Meteors flying around my house.  

I have been meaning to experiment with aluminium to see how it compared to tin and zinc.  Problem was that we didnt have any aluminium cans in the recycling bin so I put that on the shelf for a while.  Luckily our friends from up the road came round for dinner and left me 4…

Brooch, Fitness Walker, 2016, Special Stars, Possum Fur Slug, Rock Mice, Shell Mouse, Brass, Glue. 280 x 110 x 40 mm. Destined for the HS3 Collaboration show at Objectspace next month. Test drove this brooch at work today. The students were all quite excited about it with the most common response being ‘Woah!’ often followed by…

Sometimes new pieces are staring you right in the face. As obvious as the moon in the sky. Raewyn was making a cup of tea outside my office the other day. She was staring at the aluminium moon that I found in the shed and hung on the wall a few years ago. That totally relates to what…

for a meteor shower

I am starting to think about display methods if these slugs continue on their orbit to Platina. They seem naturally inclined to pile up together, but if they pile up together, what would happen to the strings.  Originally (back in March) I thought about having them scattered around on a wall with the strings hanging…

  Zinc melts at a fairly low temperature, like tin, but it takes longer to cool down. In its raw form you can see its hexagonal crystal like structure.  As the metal cools it starts to form hexagonals in the middle making it look different to the more boxy horizontal structures that appear in some…

Collaboration date #2 picked up from where we left off after a cup of coffee and a biscuit. We placed all the works that were pretty much done on one table and all the things that had yet to be resolved on the other. The large bag of bits pendant was restrung with fat red cord…